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This is a guest post by my colleague and a good friend, Ewa Erdmann (@transliteria). Ewa is a qualified and experienced freelance English-Polish translator with both linguistics and legal background. She provides translation, interpreting, website localization, editing and proofreading services for individuals and businesses. You can learn more about Ewa if you visit her website transliteria.com. And I absolutely love Ewa's blog where she shares her experience with the readers. Happy reading! And comments are welcome, as always :)

I've had a bit more time than usual this week, since I've been sick. (Who else can get the flu at -30 when all viruses sleep? Only me!) So I've been mostly in bed, thinking about global life issues ;)
But it's been a good time that helped me to think back and define some basic mistakes that beginning freelance translators often make. This post is about mistakes in business. I kind of assumed that everybody knows already about proofreading their work, etc. ;-) I tried to come up with some advice about each point in the list. Let me know what you think about the list, what you can add there and what advice you would give to new freelancers if you already have some experience in freelance translation.

I thought it would be good to share some useful links on tourism. The links are in English and/or Russian. They can be used for translating or you can use them as a reference when you teach or study this topic in English or Russian.

1) Hotel categories according to world standards (in Russian): Категории гостиниц
2) Wikipedia also gives some info about hotel types: Гостиница. Many terms are given in English and Russian, especially types of rooms.

This is a personal post, and I'd really like to hear the opinion of my colleagues about such situations and how to deal with them.
My situation is kind of like the one described in Mox's blog.
In December a new prospective client wrote to me asking about my availabiility for a new project. When I read the overall description of the project, I got really interested in it. But the client needed to know exactly how much time it would take and how much it would cost. No problem, just send me the text to look through or a part of it so I could get the gist of the style, level of complexity etc. In the reply that person just stated the wordcount, but there was no sample. I thought, maybe they didn't understand me. English is not my native language after all. In my reply, I stated the estimated time and cost based on the client's wordcount, but I repeated the request to see a part of the text. And then the person thanked me and ... disappeared.